Henrietta Robinson, the "Veiled Murderess," was also convicted in spite of a defense of insanity, but the governor commuted her sentence of death to imprisonment in Sing Sing. She spent fifty-two years in prison, the last 15 of them in an institution for the criminally insane. Her trial was sensational in the extreme: she was eccentric, she murdered a local shopkeeper and his sister on the slight provocation of a disagreement in their store, and she insisted on wearing a veil throughout her trial. Best of all, she was beautiful and she was known by the community in which she resided to have been the mistress of an "important man from the City." A lady who visited her after her conviction called her "the poor weeping Magdalen."